Presentations
"What Are Others Doing?" Adding Climate Change Impact to wind energy analysis with confidence using better data: Moving from Uncertainty to Practical Assessment
Gil Lizcano, Director, Climate Scale
Abstract
Understanding how climate change may influence regional wind resources has become an essential question for the wind energy sector. Evidence is mounting that shifting atmospheric circulation patterns are already conditioning wind regimes across several regions worldwide, with potential consequences for long-term project feasibility and energy yield. Initial discussions in the wind energy community, supported by studies using global climate models under CMIP6 and high-resolution downscaled datasets, have started to address this issue. However, there remains a considerable degree of uncertainty regarding how to systematically integrate climate change risks into feasibility assessments. Current limitations include the absence of standardized frameworks, reluctance to work with deep uncertainty datasets, and a tendency to avoid negative outlooks that might lower central (P50) or conservative (P90) yield estimates. This work explores two fronts to bridge these gaps. First, a new generation of downscaled climate datasets is introduced, combining global reference scenarios with regionalized insights. Second, a standardized method is proposed to quantify climate change impacts in wind projects, using simple but robust arithmetic that scales projected changes with global mean temperature rise. The critical question is not whether mean wind resources will decline uniformly, but how likely future conditions will deviate from historical baselines, and how strongly radiative forcing levels (e.g., 3 W/m² and above) influence these differences. Through selected case studies evaluating wind speed, direction, and atmospheric stability, we illustrate how climate change should be approached as a risk factor directly linked to the vulnerability of each project location. The intention is to provide practitioners with a clear and practical framework that encourages confident exploration of climate-related impacts while supporting a more transparent and structured integration of uncertainty into wind farm development
